Waking up at 3:30am?

[fieryspoon]

Will it be necessary to do stuff like set alarms to wake up at 3:30am, when your abilities complete or whatever, in order to compete and win? I know that you're able to queue stuff up, which might alleviate some of that pressure.

It would be cool if there could be some kind of timer in the game that tells you when all of your queued actions will complete, so you can make sure that your queued actions finish at a time when you can pay attention to the game.

Is there any kind of automatic action taken if you don't log in to tell it what to do on time? Will it keep pursuing new research and/or building new structures?

[Leedot]

There are timers at all of your factories telling you when a given item will be done being built or technology is done being researched. In terms of queing you can que up to 5 technologies at once and given that the shortest technology training time is 0.5 days that means you can que up several days worth of research in a single go. If nothing is left in the que it will begin researching the next rank of the last technology that was researched.

In terms of ship building you can que up build orders of up to 99 ships/orbitals per factory at a planet. Once all build orders are completed nothing is built automatically. The number of factories at a planet are 0-4 depending on that planets population.

Population growth and resource accumulation at a planet happens automatically over time but different planet types have different population caps and will need to be actively terraformed to increase that cap.

Couriers / Harvesters/Cargo Ships / Freighters can be set on automated routes to take resources from one planet to another.

So while all of that doesn't alleviate all need to get up at odd hours if you're really striving for maximum efficiency it should certainly help. :)

[fieryspoon]

oh cool. it sounds like if you prepare ahead of time, you can really play almost entirely on your own schedule then. thanks!

do battles require user input? If not, do they benefit from any kind of user participation?

[zarkwizard]

oh cool. it sounds like if you prepare ahead of time, you can really play almost entirely on your own schedule then. thanks!

do battles require user input? If not, do they benefit from any kind of user participation?

It's designed with the mobile pick up and go mentality in mind. We want people to be able to queue things so they don't have to baby the phone every 5 mins to do some minor thing. After all who would want to get up at 3:30am just to train that next skill... I certainly have no desire to do that..

As for combat it is handled by the servers. We have a simulation engine that tries to determine the best course of action based on the ship types fighting. Since you can end up with 1000s of ships fighting, and maybe even multiple players it would be very difficult to manage your ships in a fight. Since you can have cases where people are being sent in to help, or you are adding more ships in to the bunch. It's easier to let the players sit back and watch the simulator work out the battles.

The engine could actually handle player interaction within the battle, but we opted to leave it out for the moment and see what people think with the computer handling it. Also comes down to a bit of a time constraint. Since we would have to come up with a new way to display battles so it would be workable with player interaction. The scale of the battles could get to be immense, and sadly the iPhone would probably break down. Trying to live within the limitations of the device is a big part of some of the choices we made.

[fieryspoon]

I was hoping you'd say that too :-)

How long does it to travel between nearby stars? Will there be any kind of notification once the ships arrive at their destination, or if they get stopped on their way?

[zarkwizard]

I was hoping you'd say that too :-)

How long does it to travel between nearby stars? Will there be any kind of notification once the ships arrive at their destination, or if they get stopped on their way?

There are push notifications for the following events (they are all disabled by default, you turn on the ones you want and register the device you want them on):
Destination reached, under attack, planet lost, skill done, build done, message received

You can only have one "push" device registered with the game at a time. You can change the device simply by logging in with a different device and setting the push notifications to on. The system will them make that the default device. You will not receive push notifications on your device if you are online playing on a different device. We also will not spam you with push notifications. You can set the interval at which you will receive push notices. Minimum amount of time is 10 minutes.

For the travel distance between systems, if you are referring to how long it takes to go from one sector to the next it's about 30 seconds for a probe. The speed can be increased/decreased depending on the ship and the skills a player has. Naturally if you have the ability to jump to a beacon it's basically a single jump to go from system a to system b across the universe. That's something different though.

[fieryspoon]

cool, thanks zarkwizard :-)
I'm really looking forward to playing it in the beta!